K.R. Engineering Store Policies

Support

If you require support for a K.R. Engineering product, please start by checking the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for your particular product on our Products page on this Wiki.

If your product is not listed or your question is not answered by the FAQ, please email us with a detailed description of your problem at support@karstenrutledge.com.

If you require immediate assistance, you can instant message Ariana Kamloops or Karsten Rutledge in Second Life.

If we're not online, your message will be automatically forwarded to our email anyway, even if our IMs are capped.

You will likely receive a reply from us even if we're offline, as Second Life gives us the option to reply to forwarded messages from our email and we're often able to do so even if we're not able to log in to Second Life (such as from our smartphone).

Notecards are not accepted for support issues, primarily because we can not read or respond to them offline. Please send IM or email only.

We will never ask you for your Second Life account password. We do not want your password, please don't give it to us! Don't give it to anyone! If you give us your password we will absolutely refuse to log on as your account for any reason, no matter how "OK" you are with it or how much you think it will help, we WILL NOT DO THIS and you will be advised to IMMEDIATELY change your password.

Customer Conduct

When contacting us for support, we ask that you do not try to roleplay with us. Attempting to incorporate your roleplay experience into customer support is inappropriate and makes helping you more difficult. We are not interested in you as a character, only as a customer. When you are contacting us for support issues then you are not your character; you are the real person at your computer who needs OOC (Out Of Character) assistance for an OOC problem. Please comport yourself appropriately. Some common examples of this include:

Children. Cutesy "baby talk" may be fun when you're roleplaying with "mommy and daddy", but when contacting someone in a professional situation it is highly inappropriate and makes understanding and responding to you difficult when you are deliberately mangling your words and sentences. If you want us to roleplay with you then our only legitimate response in this situation should be to wonder where your parents are and call CPS (Child Protective Services) for the obvious neglect your parents are showing by abandoning their 2-year-old in a public store. Please just...don't.

Power-exchange dynamics. This is covered more in our Support Through Other People section below, but please do not send your slave/sub/pet to talk to us on your behalf. This goes for masters/doms as well! This is extremely inappropriate and usually unproductive as well, as we cannot properly assist a product owner through somebody else. We will always need to talk to the actual product owner to resolve an issue, so please just speak to us directly first, don't make us turn your roleplay partner away. What you do in private is your own business, please don't make it ours.

This is not a comprehensive list, just a few of the most disruptive examples. Remember that when you contact a business you should just be the real you. If we feel that your character is being disruptive to the customer service experience then we will ask you to stop roleplaying until we have finished assisting you.

Bugs

If a product you have purchased from K.R. Engineering is not working as it should, please contact us and we will look into it. Many of our products contain very complicated scripting, and sometimes bugs go unnoticed by us when we do our internal testing. If you believe you have found a bug, we will investigate and fix it ASAP when it is brought to our attention. If you know of a bug that has gone un-fixed for an extended period of time, it is probably because nobody has mentioned it to us, and we aren't aware that it exists.

Bug Bounties

If you think you've found a bug in a K.R. Engineering game, you could earn a bounty by reporting it! Follow these steps to report the bug and you could earn an L$500 gift card good towards anything at K.R. Engineering! All of the criteria below must be met before you are awarded a bounty on your bug.

The game with the bug must be a Gaming.SL compatible game (have the Gaming.SL logo present on the game itself).

If you find a bug in something other than a game, you can still report it. For example, if you find a bug in an accessory such as a scorekeeper or a prize server, you can report which game you were using it with when you encountered the bug, as long as the game you are using it with meets the above criteria.

Verify that the problem you are reporting is actually a bug. Not everything is a bug! It is at our discretion whether to award a bug bounty or not. There are some pretty common-sense things that will not earn you a bounty.

If you find a typo in the game documentation, website or the game itself, we would love to hear about it so we can correct it, but a typo is not a bug.

If the game behaves in a way that you think it should not, it is not necessarily a bug.

For example, a customer was once very cross with us because Spades progressed counter-clockwise around the table, instead of clockwise. This is not a bug, it is a design decision that you disagree with, and will not earn you a bounty.

Another example is that for a long time, Greedy Greedy did not allow four-of-a-kind plus two-of-a-kind (e.g. 222244) to count as three pairs when scoring. This was later added as an optional house rule, but it is not a bug, it was an intentional part of the scoring system.

Sometimes there are bugs that we are not able to fix because they are problems with Second Life as a whole, not with our products. One example of this is that older versions of our games sometimes display ??? in place of player names. This is a problem with Second Life giving our games bad information, not our games working incorrectly. We worked around this by reverting to old style names if we detect Second Life giving us bad information, but this is not a bug with our games.

Fundamentally, a bug is any feature that does not work as intended, rather than a feature that does not work as desired. You are always welcome to discuss how something works with us and offer suggestions for things like optional house rules, but there is no bounty for suggesting new functionality, only for reporting broken existing functionality. If you're not sure whether something is really a bug or not, feel free to report it anyway, and we'll follow up with you.

You must also tell us how you found the bug, and what it does. If we are not able to reproduce the same bug with the same results on a table of the same version, then we can't fix the bug, and you won't get credit for it. You should tell us things like:

What options were enabled on your table?

What steps did you take to get the bug to happen (e.g. "I clicked roll, and then clicked the second dice, and then I played Sweet Home Alabama on my banjo for my pet rhesus monkey, and then I clicked roll again...")

What happened, versus what you expected to happen.

If it turns out to be a new bug that we were previously unaware of, and we can reproduce it, then we will fix it and you will get a free L$500 gift card!

All of our games use common core components. For example, the script that connects the game to the Gaming.SL website is identical in all of our games. If a bug is found in this script, for example, then it is considered discovered for all games that share that identical script. You cannot report a bug as new by reporting the same bug for each game it effects, since it is the same bug and has the same effect for all of them.

Returns and Refunds

I do not offer refunds on purchased items EXCEPT in the case of duplicate purchases. A duplicate purchase is defined as accidentally purchasing the same product twice or more times simultaneously. This can occur because of server or viewer glitches at the time of purchase.

Reasons that refunds are not offered:

All items are accurately represented visually on their vendor or via display models.

Items that have scripted functionality (e.g. games) dispense detailed information notecards by touching their vendors and are available in the store to play with before purchase, so you know exactly what you are getting before you buy.

If an item turns out to be broken for some reason, we will repair it or replace it with a working copy. We do not refund for something that can be fixed.

If you are leaving Second Life, please see the After Second Life section below for more information.

Exchanges

Exchanges may be done for equivalent items (e.g. a game for a game) if you purchased the wrong product by mistake and it is a transferable item. You will be required to pay the difference in price between the item you purchased and the item you wanted, if any. Likewise, if the item you purchased was more than the item you wanted, you will be issued a partial refund after the exchange. This must be done within a week after purchase of the original item.

Exchanges for different models of an item (such as a Pocket game versus a Table game) may only be exchanged if your preferred model didn't exist at the time you bought it, or if it has been within a week of purchase of the original item.

Replacements

Alts (alternate accounts) are not eligible to receive copies of any product based on their main account having purchased it before, as Linden Lab does not give us the ability to verify that two accounts actually are connected in any way. This includes the case of the purchasing account being banned by Linden Lab, this is unfortunate regardless of the reasons, but the same problem applies.

Items 'lost' due to problems with Second Life are beyond my control, but may be replaced at my discretion if, and only if:

The product was purchased directly from me (not purchased second-hand) so that I can verify the original purchase transaction, OR...

In the case of games, if it is a Gaming.SL-connected game then we can verify the ownership of the game through the Gaming.SL database.

Items mangled/damaged by Second Life are likewise beyond my control, but will be replaced upon return of the damaged item.

Purchasing a new replacement for a missing/damaged product and then requesting a refund for it based on the premise that it is a replacement is against store policy. The new item will be treated as a separate purchase and we will operate under the assumption that you now own two (or more) distinct products, one which is missing/damaged and one that isn't. You may still qualify for a replacement of the original missing/damaged item, but the new item that you purchased does not qualify for a refund on that basis. Example:

You buy a product from our store.

It gets lost, or damaged. So you immediately buy a replacement, and then request a refund of the replacement's price.

This refund request is not valid, and you will instead get a replacement of the original lost/broken item.

You now have two of original item.

Updates

All K.R. Engineering products that were originally purchased from K.R. Engineering are eligible for free upgrades for the life of the product. The life of the product is necessarily limited by the existence of Second Life. If Second Life ever shuts down, I am not responsible for the loss of products purchased from K.R. Engineering.

Before updating items, you should check the ChangeLog of that item on this wiki by going to the Products page. The ChangeLogs detail all changes made to the item between versions. Items are subject to both appearance and feature changes when updated, often necessitated by changes to Second Life by Linden Lab. By updating you agree to those changes automatically, whether you have read the ChangeLog or not.

If you are unhappy with an updated version of a product, please contact our support email at the top of this page. We try to avoid downgrading products, as you will be terminating your upgrade path by staying with an older product, but it may be an option if you cannot use the new version for whatever reason.

If you have purchased a "used" product from a third-party reseller (someone other than Karsten Rutledge), you may not be eligible for free updates. Please see our End of Life policy page for details on why and what you can do about it. Buying "used" is always risky as you may be scammed or unable to receive proper support for it. We have no authorized resellers.

Discounts

There is a Bulk Vendor in the store that will offer discounts of up to 25% off for purchasing more than a single game simultaneously.

Retro-active bulk discounts may be given for games purchased on the same day if for some reason you were unable to use the bulk vendor.

Additional discounts are not available at this time. If you feel that you should be eligible for special pricing, please contact us, and have a good reason ready.

"Because I don't want to pay that much" is not a good reason.

Support Through Other People

This seems to confuse a lot of people, so I've decided to add this to the official policies in an attempt to clarify:

We can NOT offer support to anyone through a third party, be they friend, family, spouse, partner, slave, master, or whatever else. There are several reasons for this.

This includes ALT or ALTERNATE accounts, as we have no means of verifying whether two or more accounts are owned by the same person. Any two accounts will be treated as different people.

Reason #1: To properly support most problems, we must have you follow a set of diagnostic procedures or access information that requires the use of the account that actually has the problem.

Reason #2: (Probably the most important reason.) We can not verify that you have authority to speak on the other person's behalf, or that you've given someone else that authority.

Reason #3: Information gets lost or twisted in translation. Ever play the Telephone Game? We'd rather have as few chances for information to be corrupted as possible. This makes the experience less frustrating and time consuming for everyone involved.

If special allowances are needed because someone is not able to speak on their own behalf for whatever reason then we will work as best as we can to accommodate these needs, but at the very least we will need permission from the owner of the account with the problem to resolve it through you as a third party.

After Second Life

Linden Lab has announced they are building a new virtual world, currently known as "Second Life 2" or "Project SANSAR." We know almost nothing about this new platform, whether it will be direct competition to Second Life (and ultimately a replacement) or whether it will target a different virtual reality market altogether, or even what its capabilities will be. Assuming that it is a virtual world similar to Second Life and that it has sufficient capabilities to allow it, I will definitely be looking to expand into that new platform with my products. If and when this becomes an option, I will provide a migration path for existing customers who wish to also be part of the new platform. I will not be leaving Second Life even when the new platform is ready, so you can continue to count on customer support in Second Life for as long as it remains open.

I will not "buy back" any products if you decide to simply leave Second Life for any reason, including moving to an OpenSim grid.